darling you've got to let me know

So, on the bus ride home I get sort of a scenic tour of the western... perhaps eastern... side of the town. Which is the empty side. The side bordering The Town. Among the things I saw today, and indeed every day, is the field of abandoned duplexes that will become if not already meth labs. Mark my words. These duplexes could be the literally most depressing thing in the state. It's just a matter of time before one of those motherfuckers explodes and mortally wounds a neighboring three year old hispanic girl and her eight year old brother who has to take care of her because their single mother works at the local Hooters.
Another thing I see is a trailer that looks abandoned but isn't because there's a car parked outside. What makes this particular shitty trailer notable is the fact there there are at least half a dozen gallon bleach bottles on the lawn. This is a fairly new development and I have to wonder if perhaps the tenant- an arthritic elderly man- has offed himself by drinking several gallons of bleach and tossing them out on the lawn? I wonder if his body is still sitting in the La-Z-Boy in front of the television, rotting, because no one cares enough to report him missing.
I also see a yard populated by chickens, but for the longest time I was unable to determine that the white masses were, in fact, chickens. From the distance away from the road they look rather like white plastic bags, scattered across the ground and snagged on tree branches.
As a completely unrelated note, I feel that mothers are supposed to impart these domestic maxims to their daughters- like, never mix black and brown, always trim the stems of flowers diagonally, salt your pasta water. And I feel like I never learned anything of the sort from my own mother- I learned all of those things from magazines. But I have no idea how I missed those lessons. It's possible, likely even, that my mother never bothered to dispense such wisdom, but I don't know why she wouldn't. Often, she seems supernaturally preoccupied with mothering me. Perhaps, she thinks, as she does now, that I already know what she is going to tell me. And I often do. But it's still sort of sad. I'm often rather preoccupied with the idea of childhood, comparing my own to the ideal. I guess I have a bit of a Freudian streak.